Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Review

The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti is a standard GPU for gaming laptops. It sits below the RTX 3060 in the product stack and is a follow-up to last year’s GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1650 for laptops. With the change from a GTX product to an RTX product, we can expect to get ray tracing and DLSS functions. This last one in particular should give this popular section a nice boost.

The RTX 3050 Ti and the RTX 3050 for laptops were both announced a couple of months ago, but it’s taken us a little longer to get our hands on samples because of supply issues. This would be the same as the starting price of a GTX 1660 Ti machine from the last version. But these price goals are a bit too high. Most realistic 3050 Ti system setups cost more than $1,000, but they are still $100–200 cheaper than the same model with an RTX 3060. Right now, it’s hard to compare different versions, but that should give you an idea of where Nvidia is putting this GPU.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Specs

Price

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is now available and starts at $249 (about £185 or AU$350). Prices for more powerful third-party boards go up from there. We don’t know how the aftermarket will work once the boards are released, but if it’s anything like the RTX 3060, there might not be many graphics cards at that starting price, and costs might start to go up. For example, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black that we are reviewing here costs $249 (about £185 or AU$350) and is a pretty basic version of the graphics card. If you want something with RGB lights and cooling systems that work well with boosting, you will have to spend quite a bit more.

Performance

We bought an HP Victus 16 with an RTX 3050 Ti GPU, a Core i5-11400H processor, and 32 GB of DDR4 memory. Even though this is a cheap laptop, it works well enough for us to try how well the RTX 3050 Ti works in current games. We played a few games at 1080p levels with Ray-Tracing turned off to see how much power an RTX 3050 Ti has. Resident Evil: Village at 1080p was our starting point. Most of the time, the average frame rate in such a challenging game was between 45 and 55, but when ray-tracing is turned on, the average frame rate drops below 35. If you want to play most current games at their highest settings at 1080p and don’t care about ray-tracing, the RTX 3050 Ti is the best value. We won’t know if this GPU is right for low-cost game PCs until the desktop version of it comes out.

Design

We reviewed the simple EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black graphics card. It has two fans and an EVGA and GeForce RTX insignia on the side and is gray and black. Its lack of RGB lights and visual flair makes it ideal for low-key builds. It’s also a compact graphics card, measuring 7.94 inches like the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black. The 130W TGP makes this graphics card suitable for tiny form-factor builds. Since this graphics card’s fan is the same as the RTX 3060’s, temps are minimal. The temperature never exceeded 60 °C in our tests.That was done on an open-air test bench, so your temperatures may be higher, but there’s plenty of thermal space either way.

Good for making videos

Most Nvidia Ampere Series graphics cards use NVENC video encoders for the H.264 and H.265 formats. This is an advanced feature that moves video encoding from your CPU to a part of your GPU that is just for that. Compared to older graphics cards, this makes the whole process of changing or streaming video go much faster. The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti also has all of the tools that make a good GPU for editing videos. So, you can count on a laptop with an RTX 3050 Ti to fix your video projects or make animations.

Verdict

We can say that the speed is slightly better than on a laptop with a GTX 1660 Ti, especially when playing demanding games like Resident Evil: Village or Metro Exodus. This is one of the best graphics cards you can buy for 1080p gaming, but it’s not good enough for 1440p games. This could be because it only has 4GB of VRAM, which isn’t enough to handle a better image.